A Republic for the Ages

A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic. Edited by Donald R. Kennon. Perspectives on the American Revolution. (Charlottesville and London: Published by the University Press of Virginia for the United States Capitol Historical Society, 1999. Pp. xiv, 583. $55.00, ISBN 0-8139-1795-6.) This substantial volume incorporates architectural history, political culture, historiography, and gender analysis to explore the early years of the nation's and its Capitol. Sections on capital ideas, Freemasonry, republican symbols and architecture, and political women give the book thematic focus. The final selection, written by David Grimsted, provides an adroit metaphor for this essay collection: the conglomerate rock used to fashion the columns in the Capitol's Hall of Representatives symbolized the new nation by incorporating pebbles of many different sizes and colors. The volume's fourteen essays similarly unite a wide variety of approaches and sources: traditional textual analyses abut interpretations of ritual, space, and form, abundant illustrations give new context to familiar writings, and close readings of figural and built sources challenge historians' tendency to focus exclusively on written evidence. Part I explores early expectations for and of the nation's city. Melvin Yazawa suggests how fears of disunion in particular shaped the decision to locate the national on the Potomac. Kenneth Bowling argues that while Antifederalists associated the District of Columbia with the despotic tendencies of the Constitution as a whole, nationalist republicans hoped that the would become a commercial and cultural as well as political center. James M. Banner Jr. examines the impact on the nation of locating its in a comparative backwater and concludes that Washington's underdevelopment (past and present) divorced federal policies from the realities of urban civilization (p. 83). Banner also argues that histories of the state have overlooked many factors, including religious culture, citizenship, and jurisprudence, that are essential to the formation of a national state in its infancy (p. 65). Part II explores the role of gender and women in shaping national politics. Fredrika Teute examines Margaret Bayard Smith's long tenure in Washington and demonstrates that the ideology of separate spheres did not keep women out of politics. Washington's women instead a public within the privacy of the domestic sphere (p. 114). Teute explores the intellectual, political conversation within sociable, domestic settings and blurs the frequently made distinction between masculine reason and feminine emotion. Teute also shows that Gaillard Hunt's edition of Smith's letters--used by many historians--misrepresented Smith by eliding Smith's published writings. Jan Lewis likewise takes on the separate spheres by examining the kinds of power women held and the ways that their presence in the Capitol shaped political oratory. Lewis writes that women transformed Congress into ... `the bourgeois public sphere' (p. 146). Lewis further argues that women's presence suggested that private interests constituted public benefits. That ideological sleight-of-hand obscured the lack of identity between property holders and humanity in general. These essays powerfully reinforce the claim that women matter in the political history of the early republic not simply because they appeared in political spaces but because they shaped the way the nation's male leaders imagined the nation and negotiated its business. The third and fourth parts of the book treat Masonic symbolism and republican architecture. Len Travers argues that nationalists, Masons, and entrepreneurs all had a stake in the cornerstone ceremony. The ritual laying of the cornerstone impressed observers with its stately decorum, suggested that the new government had reconciled liberty and order, and invoked divine support for the national experiment

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